Product Description
From Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, an epic tale-part thriller, part tragedy-for our age, the political career and tragic death of the incomparable humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello

If there is a single individual who can be said to have been at center stage through all of the most significant humanitarian and geopolitical crises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it was Sergio Vieira de Mello. Vieira de Mello was born in 1948 just as the post-World War II order was taking shape. He died in a terrorist attack on UN Headquarters in Iraq in 2003 as the battle lines in the twenty-first-century's first great power struggle were being drawn. In nearly four decades of work for the United Nations, Sergio distinguished himself as the consummate humanitarian, able to negotiate with-and often charm-cold war military dictators, Marxist jungle radicals, reckless warlords, and nationalist and sectarian militia leaders. By taking the measure of this remarkable man's life and career, Power offers a fascinating answer to the question: Who possesses the moral authority, the political sense, and the military and economic heft to protect human life and bring peace to the unruly new world order?

Chasing the Flame brings us deep into the thorniest, least well- understood episodes of recent world history-the conflagration in the Middle East, through Vieira de Mello's troubleshooting in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel's 1982invasion; the clean-up of the cold war's residue, through Vieira de Mello's taming of the Khmer Rouge and his repatriation of four-hundred-thousand Cambodian refugees in the early nineties; the explosion of sectarian and ethnic militancy, through his efforts to negotiate an end to the slaughter in Bosnia; the struggle to nation-build in war-torn societies, through his quasi-colonial governorships of Kosovo and East Timor; and the engulfing of Iraq in civil war and terror, through his tragic final posting as the UN representative in Baghdad, where he became the victim of the country's first-ever suicide bomb.

Readers of Chasing the Flame will recognize the particular mixture of deep reporting and incisive analysis that Power uses to imbue Sergio's life with significance, and lessons, for our own. In this exquisitely reasoned and imagined book, Samantha Power reveals Sergio Vieira de Mello's powerful legacy of humanity and ideological strength in an age sorely in need of both.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 19 reviews)

Delivers as promised, minus one glaring editing error

Samantha Power states right off that this is a two-pronged book, and she delivers on that promise. The book is one, a biography and two, a dissertation on the role of non-governmental agencies in world affairs. The book is fast-paced and well-written, easy-to-read, not a weighted down scholarly tome. The charismatic presence of Vieira de Mello unifies the narrative as it passes from East Timor through the Balkans and ultimately to Iraq.

It's an excellent introduction to the vision of a certain group of people who are trying to change the world for the better. It's a window into a fascinating arena of both high stakes global politics and mundane down to earth development programs.

I took off one star for perhaps the most unusual editing problem I have ever run across. One of Vieira de Mello's secretaries in Iraq was Marilyn (Lyn) Manuel. In the Postmortem, she is listed among the dead from the Canal Hotel bombing. Happily, though, she comes back to life later in the chapter when it is revealed that she not only survived, but also continued her career for a time with the UN back in NYC!
November 25, 2008

East Timor and Iraq comparison is incomplete and misleading

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Power's book is her failure to present a methodical comparison of the disagreements over the role of the local population during the UN's administration of East Timor and during the US occupation of Iraq. Both were tectonic struggles with historical implications affecting state-building efforts generally, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan specifically. Power's treatment of de Mello in East Timor and Iraq is only half the story.

Power's oversight is all the more surprising given the detailed nature of the book, which is replete with microscopic anecdotal information. It is odd, therefore, to have missed out the critical aspects of pivotal world events that the struggle for local participation in both East Timor and Iraq represent. Both instances became public knowledge and considerable material is available in the public domain.

Power describes step-by-step how de Mello tried to influence Paul Bremer when, as `governor' of Iraq, he was excluding a meaningful role for the Iraqis during the occupation. She casts de Mello as a champion of Iraqi participation. What Power does not describe is the eerie parallel of arguments made to de Mello when he was the Transitional Administrator in East Timor by the UN's Head of District Administration and the original inventor of the transitional administration model, Jarat Chopra. Just as Bremer resisted de Mello in Iraq, de Mello had previously resisted Chopra in East Timor--both with disastrous consequences.

Throughout the 1990s, Chopra had pioneered the means of exercising political authority in transitions, also called "peace-maintenance". At the time, East Timor would prove to be the most extreme case of international administration, with the UN assuming sovereign as well as executive, legislative and judicial powers. Chopra, a planner of the mission in East Timor, recognized that he had not built in safeguards for local participation or checks and balances on an absolutist form of power that his peace-maintenance work had produced. Consequently, according to his account, he began to take corrective action in the field.

The UN mission as the government of the country had completely excluded any Timorese role. Yet, power-sharing was unacceptable to de Mello and rejected by him and his inner circle--who are one-sidedly interviewed by Power. Chopra's arguments mirror those made by de Mello to Bremer in Iraq. It would have been fascinating for Power to compare in both instances the back-and-forth debates over such issues as early elections, consultative bodies, timetables for transfers of power, and space for peaceful opposition to avoid future violence.

De Mello's reversal of roles, from resisting power-sharing in East Timor to arguing for it in Iraq, is to his credit, for it reflects that he learnt his lesson. It would have been compelling for Power to explain the evolution of this story.

Similarly, in many ways, de Mello was undermined in Iraq by the very image of success in East Timor that he had been instrumental in crafting. Bremer, in his own account (My Year in Iraq), explains that he did not have available to him luxuries of local participation that de Mello had in East Timor. This view is a misunderstanding of events in East Timor, where local participation was not a luxury but had to be forced on de Mello by Chopra, the World Bank and Timorese pressure. Bremer's view rests on an image of success that obscured the underlying failures of the UN in East Timor, failures that would explode into violence in 2006. One can only wonder if Bremer might have been less dismissive of de Mello had the parallels been made more apparent much earlier.

Chopra's press interviews and subsequent writings presciently predicted how events would unfold in East Timor. He was also self-critical of the mechanisms for international administration that he had designed and identified the shortcomings of external governorship--even in East Timor, which had unparalleled conditions for success. It would have been interesting for Power to investigate what impact a more honest appraisal by de Mello of the East Timor mission might have had at the time. If the US Administration had absorbed, not an image of success, but a more sober assessment of the East Timor experience, would political/military occupation still have been seen as the way to go in Afghanistan and Iraq, places which entirely lacked conditions for success?

The fallout from the Chopra-de Mello and de-Mello-Bremer dynamics regarding how to deal with local populations in transitions is playing out, not only in the reorientation of state-building, but also at the frontlines through the Pentagon's controversial Human Terrain System that embeds social scientists with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Tragically and coincidentally, the first casualty of the program was one of Chopra's own protégés, Michael Bhatia.) The debate over the program between anthropologists and the military add a degree of urgency to the missing part of Power's book, since the high politics of local participation were the antecedents to the current disagreements.
October 04, 2008

Samantha Power at her best.

Samantha Power at her best. I hope for the world's sake she's back in office when Obama wins the election. She understands what issues need to be brought to light, which people need to be recognized and which situations and failures need to be analyzed and learned from.

This is a humanitarian relief worker essencial, it also gives a lot of background into the actual work, daily routines of the UNHCR and it's international offices.

Sara
September 29, 2008

Impressively Researched But Biased and Skewed

Even though she has chosen to write about lofty and abstract human rights issues Samantha Power is a compelling writer, and it's because she's an exceptional researcher. For her book about the UN diplomat Sergio Vieira De Mello, who was killed when Al-Qaeda bombed the UN complex in Baghdad, Ms. Power conducted over 400 interviews, and spent four years on the project -- and the result is truly impressive. Each sentence is pithy, and with each chapter Ms. Power powerfully transports us from one continent to the next.

Ms. Power must be an obsessive romantic personality, someone who becomes easily passionate about and easily romanticizes a subject matter. As we read the book we can imagine how Sergio must have been on Ms. Power's mind all the time, even as she was teaching at Harvard and helping Barack Obama's campaign -- in fact Ms. Power informs us that she sees Barack Obama as resembling Sergio. But the problem with an obsession is that it is blinding, and that is the ultimate problem with this biography.

In Ms. Power's mind Vieira De Mello, a Brazilian diplomat's son whose entire professional life was within the UN system, was the quintessential international diplomat -- a brilliant linguist who was passionate and idealistic about protecting innocent civilians and ensuring their dignity but at the same time whose charisma and diplomacy enabled him to work with all factions in a conflict.

If he had lived he would have most certainly become UN Secretary-General but Vieira De Mello is dead, and Ms. Power aims to resurrect him to give the faltering international humanitarian system -- as embodied by the UN -- a role model to believe in and emulate. Ms. Power does try hard (throughout the book she makes Vieira De Mello's UN bosses look like self-serving bureaucrats), and if she were a more stylistic writer and less accomplished researcher she would have made a very compelling case. But unfortunately she is too talented a researcher, and by working hard to present the facts we're allowed to draw our own conclusions about Mr. Vieira De Mello. At best Vieira De Mello seems like a man of contradictions, always torn between his idealism and his loyalty to the United Nations. At worst he was a very talented international bureaucrat, who methodically and meticulously engineered his rise to the top of the United Nations system.

Consider Vieira De Mello's stint in Bosnia in the early nineties. This section is by far the most interesting in the book because it is so tragic and comical, ironic and ultimatey pathetic. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Bosnia was the first and best chance for Cold War organizations like the United Nations and NATO to re-invent and assert themselves for the new world order. The Serbs were massacring the Bosnians, and that was a fact that United Nations -- and Vieira De Mello -- felt it had to ignore in order to maintain impartiality, and deliver humanitarian aid. But, as Ms. Power says, maintaining impartiality is itself taking a stance, and by cozying up to Serbian officials responsible for genocide Vieira De Mello was being diplomatic but he was also condoning evil.

The UN's British commander would finally ask NATO to intervene against the Serbs, and then fearing that its peacekeepers on the ground would suffer Serbian retaliation he decided to inform the Serbs of the NATO strike, and the Serbs managed to shoot down a British warplane. The UN may claim it's trying to maintain impartiality but there's a simple word for the British commander's actions: "treason."

And if that incident wasn't silly enough Vieira de Mello volunteered to go into a section of Bosnia under siege from the Serbs. NATO had given the Serbs an ultimatum to lift the seige, and by going in to verify human rights abuses Vieira de Mello actually gave the Serbs protective cover. "Vieira de Mello's verification team seemed to be walking into a trap with their eyes open, as if they were wilfully placing themselves in harm's way in order to supply the Serbs with potential hostages and foil any potential NATO attack," Ms. Power writes. "He ignored the grumblings and focused on the task he had been assigned."

Ms. Power constantly repeats how kind and generous and loyal Vieira de Mello was to his employees and to the local civilians he was charged with caring for. But in this particular instance and throughout his career Vieira de Mello's behavior pattern is syptomatic of a megalomaniac and narcissist. He openly and flagrantly had affairs with his own employees even while he was married and had two sons. He expected complete loyalty from his inner circle, and even though Ms. Power never at once mentions it we can guess that he was a terrible manager and had terrible judgement of people. And for him what mattered all else was his career, and in the UN system that meant appeasing all politicians, even mass murderers: "[D]uring a bloody and morally fraught conflict in which the Serb side committed the bulk of the atrocities, his popularity with wrongdoers stemmed in part from his moral relativism," Ms. Power writes. "Even though he was unfailingly kind to Bosnian individuals, he had lost sight of the big picture. He seemed more interested in being liked and in maintaining access than in standing up for those who were suffering."

But of course Ms. Power writes so harshly of her hero in order to redeem him further into the narrative. By the late nineties the Serbs are now in Kosovo, and Vieira de Mello has apparently learned to stand up to mass murderers, and now instead of keeping silent highlighted Serbian abuses in Kosovo. "If he had once believed that his job was to carry out the aggregate will of powerful governments, he now acted as though he believed that promoting UN principles and protecting the UN flag entailed standing firmly for the advancement of human dignity, even if that required acting in defiance of those governments," Ms. Power writes.

Oh, really?

There is perhaps a more simple reason for Vieira de Mello's change in attitude -- his job had changed. Earlier in his career Vieira de Mello worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), an organization with a very specific mandate -- and if he wanted to rise within the organization he needed to return as many refugees home as possible. And so he was forced to work with loathsome governments in Serbia, Rwanda, and Cambodia to do his job.

By the time of Kosovo Vieira de Mello had left UNHCR for the UN bureaucracy in New York, and in his position if he wanted attention he needed to generate good publicity for himself, and attract powerful patrons.

Like the United States. Most of the UN bureaucracy was disgusted with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the only UN bureaucrat whom the Bush administration could stand was Vieira de Mello so he inevitably found himself positioned for the job of UN envoy in Iraq. The Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi (the wildly popular UN envoy in Afghanistan who helped the post-Taliban country elect a president) is a much more accomplished international civil servant than Vieira de Mello, and he rejected the job offer because he rightly assumed he could in no way contribute. Vieira de Mello agreed to the post for four months, and we have to seriously wonder what he could have accomplished in that short a time except to suck up to the Americans and bolster his resume.

It is exceptionally unfair and unkind of me to criticize a man who is now dead and many regard as a saint. Ms. Power is using his legacy to try to resuscicate a dying organization, and I'm criticizing him in order to launch a much wider criticism of the United Nations.

The sad truth about the United Nations is that it may a humanitarian organization that best represents the ideals of humanity but it is fundamentally an organization -- and like any bureaucracy or company or system -- it is only concerned with its own survival, and so develops its own logic for survival -- which usually amounts to expanding for the sake of expansion. And no matter how charming and noble and talented the man Vieira de Mello was still an employee of this organization, and if he did not internalize UN values and methods he would have not risen as far as he did in the system. And as a good employee Vieira de Mello fought hard to justify the existence of the UN.

And perhaps that was Vieira de Mello's toughest and most impossible fight. The UN is a distortion on the natural order of things, and it is often a very bad distortion. In Bosnia the UN blue helmets on the ground meant NATO couldn't bomb Serbia -- and that only embolded the Serbs to commit more atrocities. And African war criminals used UN refugee camps as shelter, money-raising opportunities, and their base of operations. And where exactly in the world has the UN actually done something constructive?

An actual analysis of the UN and its usefulness in today's world would have greatly benefited this book. But Ms. Power is so obsessed over Vieira de Mello, and basically takes it for granted that the UN is a necessity. The UN is big and it's going to stick around for a long time because of bureaucratic inertia but -- fortunately for the world -- that doesn't make it a necessity.
August 20, 2008

a must read for anyone that cares about foreign affairs

I picked up on this book after Ms. Power's interview with Charlie Rose. Ms. Power's message is that Sergio Vieira de Mellow was not a saint but a human being driven by the desire to help mankind. Sergio should not be forgotten. This is a very readable lesson in the recent history of the U.N. and, in particular, the hopeless situation of the U.S. involvement in Iraq. August 19 is a day to reflect on the memory of Sergio Vieira and his mission.
July 27, 2008

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